Exclusives

Salesforce Exec: Company’s Benefiting from ‘Radical State of Change’ in Tech

Salesforce is significantly benefiting from the growing popularity of mobility and increased acceptance of cloud services, according to David Havlek, its EVP of finance.

“The world is in this radical state of change” with customer experience due to “this move to mobility and this move to social and now with embedded Internet devices inside of products,” he said Dec. 8 at the Barclays Global Technology, Media and Telecommunications Conference in San Francisco.

“Salesforce is really in the pole position and customers are increasingly coming to us and saying ‘help us in this new world engage with customers,’ and that’s really our mission, and no company is better positioned than us to go get that,” he said.

“Salesforce grew up” in the Server Message Block (SMB) network protocol space, he told the conference, pointing out: “Most small businesses didn’t have the IT resources or the budget to go after big enterprise-type software, so they mostly used spiral notebooks and other things” like that back then. “If I think back 11 years ago, a lot of big IT shops didn’t want to deploy the cloud. It was a bit of a threat to them.”

But, he said, “now you have this huge ecosystem — you have this huge cloud economy” and “I think most CIOs today are not asking if the cloud is part of their future, it’s when and how much of the future it’s going to be because it’s letting them go much, much faster.”

The financial services vertical represents a “huge, huge opportunity,” but it’s been a “less rapid adopter” of the cloud than other sectors due to security needs and other factors, he said. However, “we’ve really seen a tipping point” in that sector and “now we’re building some really big service opportunities with big financial services,” he said, adding: “I think we’re at a tipping point now with the enterprise and … I think we’re just scratching the surface of what’s possible.”

With its Einstein artificial intelligence (AI) platform and machine learning, Salesforce is “in a position to drive much greater levels of productivity and more value for our customers,” he also told the conference.

After seeing a few deals “slip out” of the second quarter, Salesforce bounced back with a strong third quarter, ended Oct. 31, during which it closed on those deals early in the quarter, he said. “As a result, the number of large transactions in the third quarter was a little more than we would expect from a seasonal perspective. Because we were able to get those deals done early in the quarter, that translated into really strong cash flow,” he said.

The company has also raised guidance consistently so far this year and even raised its revenue guidance for this fiscal year by $50 million on the top line, he said.

Asked about the widely reported recent rumor that it was considering a purchase of Twitter, he said: “You should think of Salesforce as being at the center of a very important tech universe, and we are very engaged with many companies, helping them be successful in many cases. And we would like nothing more than for Twitter to be a wildly successful company, and so anything we can do to help them we’re certainly doing. And through that we engaged in some discussions, and I think they were good discussions.”

Havlek went on to say: “In many ways, those discussions also make Salesforce better because they help us see different technology ideas and see new opportunities. And while that rumor obviously ended up being nothing more than a rumor, I think it did help Salesforce be a better company in terms of how we see things.”